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Credit to Author: Jason Parham| Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2018 18:25:18 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Two days before <\/span>the 2016 presidential election, @woke_blacks posted an anti-voting polemic to its Instagram account<\/a>. \u201cThe excuse that a lost Black vote for Hillary is a Trump win is bs. Should you decide to sit-out the election, well done for the boycott,\u201d the caption read. \u201cI remind us all one more time, anyone who wins can literally change less about the state of Black people, we are on our own, esp. after Obama. Wise up my people!\u201d Another user, @afrokingdom_, shared a comparable sentiment: \u201cBlack people are smart enough to understand that Hillary doesn\u2019t deserve our votes! DON\u2019T VOTE!\u201d<\/p>\n According to a new report<\/a> commissioned for the Senate Intelligence Committee by cybersecurity firm New Knowledge<\/a>, those accounts, along with dozens more, were part of an extensive and complex campaign to suppress the black American vote by the Russian firm Internet Research Agency.<\/p>\n In late 2017, it was first reported by CNN<\/a> that the pro-Kremlin enterprise masterminded a plot to infiltrate online communities of the Black Lives Matter movement. But New Knowledge\u2019s report, released Monday, shows a much more sustained and purposeful focus on black Americans\u2014as the IRA went about instigating mistrust in law enforcement and political institutions, while cultivating seemingly authentic narratives of black pride.<\/p>\n The report details how black Americans were among the most exploited online communities by the IRA, cataloging how the Russian firm developed an \u201cexpansive cross-platform media mirage\u201d that specifically targeted black people by leveraging popular social media sites. The campaign was \u201cdesigned to exploit societal fractures\u201d and \u201cerode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself,\u201d the report states. \u201cThis campaign pursued all of those objectives with innovative skill, scope, and precision.\u201d<\/p>\n The 100-page report is based on data sets provided to the Senate by Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet, comprising tens of thousands of posts between 2015 and 2017. In addition to social media sites, the IRA\u2019s vast and varied disinformation campaign played out across issue-specific domains that they bought such as blackmattersus.com, black4black.info, and blacksoul.us\u2014\u201ca complex effort\u201d to manipulate public opinion with the intention of siphoning votes from Hillary Clinton to help elect Donald Trump. The black community, often a reliably strong voting bloc for Democrats, was a substantial target.<\/p>\n The IRA went about instigating mistrust in law enforcement and political institutions, while cultivating seemingly authentic narratives of black pride.<\/p>\n Spread among Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels, the IRA\u2019s tactics ranged from ad targeting, meme warfare, video manipulation, and the creation of sham account profiles. As my WIRED colleagues point out<\/a>, much of this content was designed to encourage a lack of faith among black Americans in democratic institutions and decelerate black turnout for Clinton. \u201cAs the election became imminent,\u201d the New Knowledge report says, \u201cthose themes were then tied into several varieties of voter suppression narratives: don\u2019t vote, stay home, this country is not for Black people, these candidates don\u2019t care about Black people.\u201d (A second report, also produced for the Senate, by Oxford University\u2019s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika comes to similar conclusions about the IRA\u2019s work, according to the Washington Post<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n One of the more fascinating bits from the New Knowledge report was YouTube\u2019s role as an influence platform. Of the 1,107 videos linked to the IRA, the majority of the content\u201496 percent, according to researchers\u2014centered on Black Lives Matter and police brutality. A video by Williams & Kalvin, titled \u201cThe truth about elections,\u201d is cited as one of the more \u201covert suppression narratives\u201d employed by an IRA-affiliated entity. In another instance, the IRA co-opted a human-interest story about \u201can inspirational young Black American who made the national news for a device he invented.\u201d The IRA accounts repurposed that story across its web of counterfeit accounts with messages meant to cultivate distrust in American society: \u201cThese are stories of Black children the media don\u2019t want you to see\u201d and \u201cWhite people invent tools for killing, this Black child is inventing a tool for saving lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Of the Russian firm\u2019s race-specific domains, Blackmatters.us was perhaps the most effective in amplifying the IRA\u2019s intended media mirage. It essentially operated like a digital marketing company as it built an online presence across multiple platforms, creating various accounts to reinforce its brand and distribute content wholesale. Their strategy took on real-world resonance in other instances, as well, as they instituted recruitment efforts. \u201cPosts encouraging Americans to perform various types of tasks for IRA handlers appeared in Black, Left, and Right-targeted groups,\u201d the report states, noting that such efforts had the biggest presence in black communities. \u201cMany posts solicited protestors, writers, activists, lawyers, and photographers to attend the property\u2019s numerous events. They posted job ads for real American writers to create content \u2026 a clear example supporting the hypothesis that the IRA engaged in narrative laundering.\u201d<\/p>\n When reports of Russian infiltration into the Black Lives Matter movement first emerged, I wrote<\/a> that urgent social and political crusades have historically attracted noxious efforts to infiltrate and dismantle them. The deeper reasons behind such a ploy are as unsurprising as they are obvious: black liberation movements have faced a constant and public threat from outside detractors for decades. And the tactic of exploiting racial tension in the US has specifically Russian precedent that extends back to even before the Cold War, as Julia Ioffe wrote in The Atlantic<\/em><\/a> last year.<\/p>\n The weaponization of memes<\/a> were a crucial element in the IRA\u2019s crusade, too. Black online communities were particularly targeted with memes concerning \u201cdistinct historical conspiracies \u2026 intended to reinforce cultural identity as well as create discord.\u201d Posts that claimed classical composer Mozart was actually black and that Shakespeare\u2019s plays were written by a black woman earned enough engagement that accounts used them repeatedly. And the report details that the IRA\u2019s activity on Instagram<\/a> was much more extensive than previously reported, with even more engagement than on Facebook.<\/p>\n That the IRA found success in these campaigns, to a degree, is not surprising. They saw the United States for what it was, for how it has, on the whole, historically treated black Americans, and decided to exploit that history of injustice. They grafted their strategy onto a scaffolding that is very much made in the USA: long-festering racial tensions; policing issues born out of cities like Ferguson and Oakland; a mainstream media that has excluded voices of color and therefore lends itself to not being trusted by communities it doesn\u2019t represent, ultimately leading people to seek out alternative outlets.<\/p>\n In the end, the IRA went to great lengths to siphon power from black voters, with a mixed-media, cross-platform strategy that researchers are still working to fully understand. And despite efforts by Facebook, Twitter, Alphabet, and other companies to eradicate such content from their platforms, distortion tactics by the IRA persist today. \u201cThe narratives,\u201d the researchers write, \u201cjust evolved.\u201d<\/p>\n